The first article is four and a half years old and looks a lot like biased journalism, written to prove a point.

It doesn't matter that it's old. When it was written, those prices were current and valid.

The fact is that if you match all specs, not only certain ones, the prices are about the same.

Even if they really tried to build an equivalent PC with the lowest budget (unlikely: as a base point, choosing a retail version of Windows for a home-built PC would cost significantly more than the OEM/system builder's version, and as system builders at Tom's they certainly know that - where else they spent more unnecessarily, such as over $550 for the case + a PSU that pushes 300% of the power the system needs at full-bore, is beyond what I care to research), once you start upgrading beyond the base configuration, the price difference skyrockets in favor of the home-build. Either way, I'll concede that Macs often cost less than twice the price of an equivalent PC, though in many cases they are indeed double or more.

They matched all of the specs. You dont' get to compare a cut down PC with a top of the line Mac and then blame the difference on one being a Mac.

The MacBook Air used to be something of an exception to Apple machines being overpriced (for maybe a year or two) - since the MBA largely carved out the niche that ultrabooks were trying to fill, it was hard for other manufacturers to offer something equivalent or better at the same price.

In other words, Macs aren't overpriced.

Since that (speculative) notebookcheck article came out a year and a half ago, when ultrabooks were just starting to appear in the PC world, PC ultrabooks have plummeted in price while offering better engineering than their predecessors, while the MacBook Air is pretty much the same MacBook Air, much as the iPhone has lost a great deal of its lead over Android phones in the same time period, not just in value or market share but in features as well.

The current MacBook Air is also better than the one when that article was written. It's also about time for another update, which is expected to have a Retina display.

Where Android is selling a lot is overseas, in markets that Apple is traditionally not strong. It's also cheap phones and ones running older Android versions, some even with Froyo, a version of Android that's several years old!

In the PC world, the HP Envy Spectre line has arguably tried to take Apple's lead in slick, overpriced, underpowered machines, but they're an exception rather than the rule.

So PCs can be overpriced too? Got it.

Price and the proprietary nature of the OS are two things that bother me about Apple,

OS X is less proprietary than Windows. A substantial portion of it is open source, including the kernel.

Where I'm calling OSX proprietary, I'm not basing my argument on the nature of the code, but on the user license. It's built on (some) open source code, but it's still paid software, and its terms of service designate that it is restricted for use on (i.e. proprietary to) Apple-built machines. That Apple uses more open-source code than Microsoft is not relevant to the discussion of usage rights for the OS.

They restrict it because it is impossible to support all the zillions of possible configurations you could get on a PC. It's a tech support nightmare, which is why Microsoft is moving in that direction. Same for Android, for that matter. Google approves the design of Android phones before they're sold if they want the full Android experience (Play Store, Maps, etc.).

but the cult of Apple would turn me away every time even if those others weren't in place. Your response demonstrates that many Apple users have legitimate reasons for using Apple over other brands - you don't seem to fit into the cult. But so many others do, and they are by far the most annoying brand-loyalists I've ever met.

Why is it when someone is happy with a Mac, they're deemed as part of a cult?

It's not when they're happy with a Mac, it's when they proselytize, claiming Mac as the only acceptable option and repeating tired aphorisms like, "once you go Mac, you never go back." You're not doing that; you're giving legitimate reasons for why you support Apple. I don't happen to agree with some of them, but that's purely a difference of opinion.

Only because bashers attack first, calling Mac users brainwashed sheep paying for overpriced products, etc. Why does anyone care what someone else buys and what they pay for it? If it does what they need, what difference does it make?

My mom went full-on Mac cult about eight years ago. She had a poorly-maintained, five-year-old Dell that she had bought new for about $1000 (even cheap laptops were fairly expensive 13 years ago). When she spent about $1800 for a MacBook Pro, it worked better than her old el-cheapo laptop, so she decided that Apple was better and she's never looked back. That her current MacBook Pro crashes regularly even after multiple repair trips has had zero impact on her brand loyalty and belief that no other manufacturer could ever come close to Apple for reliability.

Many times, Apple will replace a machine that has multiple failures with a brand new one, one that's newer than what they had before. In other words, a free upgrade for getting a lemon.